Stock Market Monday Mini-Drama

By: PhilStockWorld

Doug Short writes: The S&P 500 slipped at the open and spent the day in a narrow 0.31% range from its intraday low, 45-minutes into trading, to its intraday high eleven minutes before the close. And speaking of the close, that was the only inkling of interest in an otherwise dull day of trading. At 3 PM sharp the index launched a rally that broke above the opening price. Would we finish with gain? Alas, the rally fizzled in the final minutes, and the index closed with a fractional loss of 0.06%. Here is a 5-minute snapshot of today, highlighting the closing mini-drama.

Here is a ten-minute chart of Friday and today. It appears that 1518 is short-term resistance. Will it give way tomorrow? Today’s volume was 27% below the 50-day moving average, which suggests that the current rally may be reaching a point of exhaustion.

The S&P 500 is now up 6.37% for 2013 and 0.06% below the interim closing high set on Friday.

From a longer-term perspective, the index is 124.2% above the March 2009 closing low and 3.1% below the nominal all-time high of October 2007.

For a better sense of how these declines figure into a larger historical context, here’s a long-term view of secular bull and bear markets in the S&P Composite since 1871.

- Phil

www.philstockworld.com

Philip R. Davis is a founder of Phil's Stock World (www.philstockworld.com), a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders. Mr. Davis is a serial entrepreneur, having founded software company Accu-Title, a real estate title insurance software solution, and is also the President of the Delphi Consulting Corp., an M&A consulting firm that helps large and small companies obtain funding and close deals. He was also the founder of Accu-Search, a property data corporation that was sold to DataTrace in 2004 and Personality Plus, a precursor to eHarmony.com. Phil was a former editor of a UMass/Amherst humor magazine and it shows in his writing -- which is filled with colorful commentary along with very specific ideas on stock option purchases (Phil rarely holds actual stocks). Visit: Phil's Stock World (www.philstockworld.com)

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